Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question is about what makes a pianist’s sound unique. This is a really tough question to answer, but I’m going to do my best!
My wife is a flutist. When she was very young, she studied with some great concert flutists. At one point she heard her teacher play her cheap student level flute. Sure enough, it no longer sounded like a cheap flute. It sounded like this great flutist! With wind instruments, it’s obvious. And it’s most obvious with singers. As soon as you hear a voice, you know who it is.

If you hear Frank Sinatra, there’s no doubt about who you’re listening to.

With piano, it’s much further removed from singing, certainly. It isn’t even like the distinctive sounds of wind and string players. But indeed, there are unique sounds different pianists produce. I grew up idolizing Horowitz and Rubinstein. The whole methodology of their pianistic approach was so drastically different from one another. So, this enters into it. Certainly, physiology has something to do with the sound of the piano as well. A massive man might have a bigger sound compared to a very slight man or woman. But not always. It goes much deeper. How you hear things will affect the way you approach the keyboard, and results in very different sound production.

What are some of those differences? Well, I was trained from a very young age by my father, Morton Estrin, to have the weight of the arms supported by the fingers instead of having limp fingers floating in midair and letting the fingers push down. Now, in very fast passages that’s exactly what you want to do, because you can’t support much weight when you’re going very quickly. But in a slow melody, you certainly want to have a sense of line. And the best way to get that is to use the weight of the arm. Using this method you can produce a fluid line on the piano like a singer. Playing just with the fingers, without supporting with the weight of the arm, results in a less fluid performance. Naturally, how the pedal comes into play also affects the tone tremendously.

There are some pianists who produce such unique sounds that you know who they are instantly!

I find this amazing. With the human voice, you’ve got the whole inside of the body and the vocal cords and the intonation of speech. On a wind instrument, you have the lips and you also have the throat and the vibrations within the chest cavity. There is so much more to identify sound. What do you have with the piano? The tone is produced by hammers hitting strings. How the heck do you achieve a distinct sound? Well, just like I have revealed previously, growing up I had very small, weak fingers, and yet I grew up hearing my father and some of his spectacular students. I always would strive to get that big beautiful sound. In fact, I contorted my body trying to make my spaghetti fingers produce anything close to the sound I heard from my father. But I made it happen in slow music particularly. Fast pieces were a little bit tougher for me having weak fingers, and I didn’t practice a great deal as a young child. But on slow music though, even from the youngest age, I was able to produce the sounds that I heard just from making it happen.

The sound of a pianist comes down to what they hear in their head and achieving that sound.

So that’s the lesson for today. It’s all about the connection of the hands to the ears. And that’s what you want to strive for in your playing so you can express your voice on the piano. I’d love to hear from any of you who have ideas about how to produce a beautiful sound on the piano! There’s a lot more to this subject, and I may produce a whole series about this on my Patreon channel. Thanks to all of you who have subscribed! I’ll see you next time. Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource. Thanks again for joining me.

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Hi, I’m Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com. Thanks so much for joining me. The question today is how the 80/20 rule applies to the piano. How it applies may surprise you!

So, what is the 80/20 rule? You may have heard this before. The 80/20 rule is, for example, in the piano, how spending 80% of your time on 20% of the score will benefit your practice. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the 80/20 rule doesn’t apply to the piano exactly. Because I would say it’s more like 90/10!

Really, you’ll learn a piece of music and then spend 90% of your time on 10% of the piece.

There’s just a very small amount that really requires almost all of your time and effort. Of course there is great temptation to always go back to the beginning and play the parts you know, because it’s fun and you want to work on those parts to make them better and better. There’s no end to how well you can play something.

But really laser focusing on the small sections, sometimes spending 98% of your practice time on 2% of the music is necessary. Other days you can have a more fluid type of practice where you’re covering more substantial parts of your piece. Particularly when you’re getting ready for performance, you want to be able to get the sense of playing complete pieces, playing half a program, then playing the whole program is how to prepare for a concert. But certainly in the formative parts of learning music, you want to focus your attention on the parts that need refinement to be productive. I see so many people who spend hours and hours at the piano and don’t seem to accomplish what they are after and this is one way to increase your productivity tremendously. So, in your practice, don’t just keep going through the things you can already play well, even though you can always refine further.

Put your attention where it’s needed early on.

You may feel like you’ll never get through the piece if you spend so much time on a small section. Maybe it’s a four or eight measure phrase, and you’re thinking, my gosh, if I spend an hour or an hour and a half on this, I’m never going to get through the piece! Here’s the epiphany you will have. Spend that time on the front end on some of those hard sections and you will be rewarded because you’ll find that almost all pieces of music have repeats of different themes and technical challenges. And by delving into those sections head-on, you’re going to be able to accomplish so much more as you go further with the learning of the piece.

So yes, the 80/20 rule applies and maybe even it’s even more extreme than that. I’d love to hear from all of you how you feel this applies to your practice and keep the questions coming in. I’m so pleased to have so many subscribers! If you haven’t subscribed yet, you’re welcome to! There’s even more content on my Patreon page. Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPIanos.com , Your Online Piano Resource. Thanks again for joining me.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about when to listen to recordings of music you are learning. I know a lot of students like to listen to a bunch of recordings of a piece to get familiar with it before they start learning it. Then as they’re learning they keep listening and listening. Maybe they find one performance they particularly like and just listen to it incessantly. Naturally, they’re going to imitate that performance. There are two reasons why I don’t recommend doing this. Listening to performances to see what music you’re interested in learning is great. Of course listening to music is enjoyable and valuable. However, when you want to learn a piece of music, you don’t want to be highly influenced by any one particular interpretation. Also, you want to challenge yourself to see if you can learn something from the written page and see what you come up with. Naturally, there are styles of music where learning by ear is the best approach when the sheet music is incidental to the original performance or recording.

When I start working on a piece, I don’t listen to any recordings at all!

I learn the whole piece until I have it on performance level. At that point I’ve carved out a concept of how to play that piece. That’s when I first listen to recordings. That way when I listen to those recordings, they don’t overly influence me. I get a different take, but I come to my own conclusions about the music, and I think you should do the same thing. This method really helps you to understand how to decipher rhythms, phrasing, expression, not to mention the notes of the music, and to come to an idea of what tempo you like.

Give yourself the opportunity to find your own way.

If after you’ve learned a piece of music you listen to half a dozen recordings and everybody plays it way faster or slower than you do, you might rethink what you’re doing. Maybe there’s some validity to the common wisdom. Maybe there isn’t though. Have you ever heard Glen Gould recordings where he plays tempos that are drastically different from other people? Sometimes that can be enlightening. So, go with your convictions! But the only way to have convictions is to not be influenced before you learn something. So. don’t depend upon recordings to help you learn pieces by ear because you’ll never be able to express your true inclinations of the music if you never give yourself an opportunity to explore them. I hope this is helpful for you!

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
You can join the Living Pianos Patreon to unlock access to exclusive videos and original music! www.patreon.com/robertestrin

Robert@LivingPianos.com
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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about whether you have to analyze a piece of music in order to memorize it. It’s interesting, because in some ways I think that you have to memorize a piece to analyze it! But do you have to analyze a piece at all to memorize it? There are aspects of the composition you certainly need to understand such as the time signature, the key signature, things of that nature. The truth of the matter is, when you’re learning a piece of music you’re absorbing the sound, and you’re absorbing the tactile feel of it. You’re developing a deep understanding of the composition. You should know whether you’re in a transition to a second subject or recapitulation, or a stretto in a fugue. These are all interesting things to observe. But it’s not essential that you understand the inner workings of a composition before learning it.

I think it’s somewhat impossible to delve into a piece and have a deep understanding of what makes it tick without committing it to memory.

If you’re learning a sonata movement you certainly want to understand where the exposition ends and where your themes are. And once you’ve memorized it you can go back and figure things out so you don’t take a wrong turn. You might find that you go to the exposition when you should be in the recapitulation or vice versa. So, some analysis is really important for memorization. But to a large extent, just like you can learn to sing a song without necessarily thinking about the pitches or the rhythms, you just sing it because you can hear it. A lot of music can be approached that way.

Having the intellect to back it up is really important.

As I said, you can take a wrong turn. You might not quite understand something, and once you delve into the score it will make more sense to you and make it easier to remember. So analyze important aspects of the piece you’re working on, but then get to work memorizing the way I’ve described, small chunk by small chunk, connecting as you go. Starting with hands separately, one phrase at a time. I have videos on this subject which you can explore at LivingPianos.com/blog. Analyzing is to your benefit, certainly, but you’re going to understand a piece much better after you learn it! And you will be able to analyze it on a much deeper level after you memorize it. I hope this is helpful for you!

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
You can join the Living Pianos Patreon to unlock access to exclusive videos and original music! www.patreon.com/robertestrin

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to establish a slower tempo in your piano practice and performance. This is vital in order to cement a solid performance. You might think that there is nothing to it. But I can tell you from teaching for many years that when students encounter a problem and they are instructed to play slower, most of the time they play at exactly the same tempo! So how do you actually establish a slower tempo?

Slow down your counting!

First, find what tempo you’re actually playing. Count along as you play. Once you can play at that tempo, continue counting without playing. Then you can go slower by saying, “one” then wait for just a moment, then say, “two” and continue at that new rate. By taking a moment after you say the first number, then continuing at that rate, that is the simplest way to establish a slower tempo. (You can also utilize a metronome to accomplish the same thing.) Then, play at that new tempo. For practicing, it’s an essential technique. Because being able to slow down to a workable tempo to think through sections that you’re working on is important for solidifying your music.

Solidifying tempo in a performance is vital for having a successful performance.

This technique is equally important in performance. When you play a performance, you’re naturally going to get excited. The adrenaline flows and if you’re not careful, you might take too fast a tempo. So, always lock in your tempo by thinking of the music and counting at that tempo. Then go back and slow it down by delaying after the first count and continuing at that new rate. Then imagine the music at that rate to make sure that it’s the right tempo. I hope this is helpful for your practice and your performance!

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
You can join the Living Pianos Patreon to unlock access to exclusive videos and original music! www.patreon.com/robertestrin

Robert@LivingPianos.com
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This is LivingPianos.com and I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to know when to move on in your practice. Sometimes it’s hard to know when to stay with things to solve a problem and when to say, “Enough is enough. I will revisit this later on.” The crux of productive practice is knowing the point of diminishing returns. It can be very easy to give up on learning a difficult passage and say, “Oh, this is just too hard. I’m going to try this again tomorrow.” But, there are many things you can do first before coming to that point. If you can’t get something, slow it down. If you still can’t get it, try hands separately, and revisit the score. There are so many options! Try breaking things down into chords. Take smaller sections and piece the sections together. There are a myriad of things you can try.

You don’t have to stop memorizing just because you can’t get everything together.

The method I use and teach for memorizing music is to take small sections at a time memorizing each hand separately first. Then put your hands together and get a small section memorized. Then go back and connect the sections going back to the beginning. But, sometimes you can’t go back to the beginning. Sometimes you can just go back to the previous phrase and piece together every other phrase. So, you have the first four measures, then you connect them to the next four measures. Then when you connect the next four measures, maybe you can’t go all the way back to the beginning, but you at least connect to the previous four measures. That is one thing you can do to plow through. That’s an example of working past the point of diminishing returns. The next day you can get fluid on the longer sections, and get everything put together. So the general rule is: try to simplify and break things down to digestible chunks.

Eventually, you’re going to come to a point where you’re not making progress.

When you get to a point where you’re not making progress on a technical or musical challenge, and you’ve already tried metronome speeds, you’ve tried taking little sections at a time, you’ve tried different articulations, different phrasing, you’ve tried hands playing separately, you’ve tried everything, and you’ve made some improvement. But it’s not nearly where you want it to be. That might be a good time to work on something else. Then tomorrow, when you’re fresh, you start a notch under the tempo you were playing the day before. Sometimes just sleeping on it will foster growth in your music! You’ll be pleasantly surprised to find that the thing you’d been struggling with the day before now comes much more easily to you. Because when you first learn something, it’s never secure immediately.

Music grows naturally with time as you reinforce your memory and refine your playing.

That’s the lesson for today. I hope this is helpful for you. It is absolutely essential to have productive practice so you know when to move on and when to keep plowing through. And generally speaking, when you run into problems, first, try to simplify by either slowing down, sectionalizing, or playing hands separately, so you’re still making progress. But when you’ve built things to a point and you can’t get any further, move on and don’t feel badly about it. Tomorrow’s another practice day!

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is. about focusing on corrections instead of your mistakes. This may seem counterintuitive. Don’t you have to find your mistakes in order to find the corrections? It’s true that you need to find where your problems are. But beyond that, you don’t want to hunt for what you did wrong. I know a lot of students desperately want to find their mistakes. What’s worse is when they not only want to find the mistakes, but they want to replay them to see exactly what they did wrong. This reinforces the mistakes! You want to learn and cement the corrections right from the get go. This might seem like an arbitrary distinction. But think about when you play a concert, you obviously want to put on a good performance. You want to have the performance securely memorized. You don’t want to go out there thinking, “I hope I remember everything. Am I going to remember the third movement?” If you start thinking that way, it’s a downward spiral, because whatever you think about tends to manifest itself.

Visualization can be extremely valuable in a concert situation.

Conceptualize and see things the way you want them to be in your performance. Imagine yourself on stage in front of an audience. Imagine your performance going well and you’re much more likely for that to happen. But, if in preparation for your concert you’re thinking about the mistakes you might make, it can be crippling. Those thoughts keep percolating in the back of your mind. Then when you get out on stage, it’s going to undermine your performance. It’s the same thing with searching for your mistakes. You don’t want to concentrate on your mistakes. You want to concentrate on the corrections! And that is what is going to assure a good performance for you.

So instead of asking, “What did I do wrong there?” Find out, “What do I need to do right there?”

This is an important distinction that will help the productivity of your practice tremendously. And it’s a lesson for life as well. Remember, you believe what you tell yourself. This is an important fact. So take this to heart, in everything you do and everything you think, because it has a profound effect upon what happens to you in life, and in your music.

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I have a really interesting presentation for you. What happens in a studio after dark? This week we’ve been putting together two whole new studios here. Late last night I walked over to the piano and it sounded so beautiful in my studio I just started recording.

I didn’t even turn the lights on!

I think you’re going to appreciate what I played. Interestingly, this idea of doing things after hours in a recording studio is nothing new. Studio time used to be very expensive, and even today to get a good room with good acoustics and a good piano is tough. A lot of times bands or musicians come in after hours when everything is quiet and dark, and it can be a very inspiring time to make music which you can hear for yourself.

That’s a little bit of what can happen after the studio is closed. You can’t choose when you will be inspired. So, a lot of these things can just go by the wayside and nobody ever gets to experience them because no one’s there. But the beautiful thing about a studio is that you can record! So that’s what I’m going to do for you with my new studios and loyal audience of subscribers, for which I am so grateful! You can join the Living Pianos Patreon to get even more! I figure this is the time to share my music with all of you. I hope you enjoy it!

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about the importance of setting goals in your piano practice. There are 3 distinct ways of practicing the piano depending upon what you’re trying to achieve. I have an extended video about this on my Patreon channel, which you’re all welcome to join. But I’m going to give you a little taste of it because it’s so important!

Knowing what you’re trying to achieve is a prerequisite for getting anything accomplished when you sit down to practice.

Whether you’re learning a piece of music to memorize it, or you’re trying to develop your sight reading, or perhaps you are working on improvisation skills, these are all important skill sets. So, here are some tips from my Patreon channel for you.

Piano music is extremely complex compared to almost any other instrument.

You have to have a unique way to approach learning music on the piano. For example, if I were to recite a series of twenty random numerical digits, it would be difficult for you to remember all of them. Even if those numbers were repeated several times, you would still struggle to commit all twenty digits to memory. But if I gave you only three digits, it would be very easy to remember them. Then, I could give you three more digits, and three more after that connecting as you go, you could learn those twenty digits in just a few minutes! Because, there is only a certain amount of information your brain can assimilate at one time. That is the secret to memorizing piano music, or anything else!

Look with your eyes, not your head.

When sight reading music, if you need to glance at your hands, do not move your head. It takes too long. Just look down with your eyes instead. Your eyes are quick! Trust your feel and and your ears when sight reading rather than trying to look at your hands.

Keep Your Eyes on the Score

When I was much younger, my father was performing the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall. One day he asked me to accompany him in his studio, since he had two pianos. He put the music in front of me and I felt overwhelmed – all those flats and so many notes, a whole orchestral score reduced for the piano! At that time I could barely sight-read anything. But, I just kept my eyes on the score. I missed more notes than I got, but I got through it! I never lost my place in the score. From that moment on, I knew I could read anything, and I’ve been getting more and more of the notes ever since! So, that’s the secret, keeping your eyes on the music. The best way I’ve discovered to have the discipline to do that is playing with other musicians.

This is just a taste of what’s available on Patreon.

I hope this has been enlightening for you! It’s so important to utilize different methods of practice depending upon what you want to accomplish. That’s a really important subject that I wish all teachers would show their students. If you enjoy exploring pianos and piano playing, you may want to join my Patreon family which offers you even more videos and the opportunity to be part of the creative process. These videos are for you!

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729